Full-duplex communications is used in many telecommunications technologies, e.g., ordinary wired telephones, Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), wireless with directional antennas, free space optics, and fiber optics. The impact of full-duplex links in these earlier applications is limited to doubling the rate by providing two symmetrical pipes of data flowing in opposite directions. This affects the point-to-point throughput with no direct impact on networking and security issues. In contrast, in multi-user wireless systems, due to the nature of transmission that everyone hears everyone else, security protocols are needed to access the public channels.
Although full-duplex is currently used for example in wireless systems with highly directional antennas or free space optics, the underlying full-duplex radios are essentially nothing but two independent half-duplex systems separated in space. In fact, the general two-way channel is very difficult to realize in wireless communications due to excessive amounts of self-interference, i.e., the interference each transmitter generates for the receiver(s) in the same node.
Other prior art techniques to provide a type communication system that might be referred to as full-duplex are really frequency division duplex (FDD), where separate frequency ranges are used in the transmit and receive (uplink/downlink) directions. As used herein, however, the term full-duplex is intended to refer to simultaneous transmission and reception of signals within the same frequency band.
Current wireless systems are one-way and rely on either separate time slots (Time Division Duplex) or separate frequency bands (Frequency Division Duplex) to transmit and to receive. These alternatives have their relative pros and cons, but both suffer from lack of ability to transmit and to receive simultaneously and over the entire frequency band. Even in the context of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), where different frequency tones are used to simultaneously service multiple users, there is no method known to use the tones in opposite directions. A similar shortcoming exists in the context of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) where different codes are used to separate users. It is well known that two-way wireless is theoretically possible, but it is widely believed to be difficult to implement due to a potentially large amount of interference, called self-interference, between transmit and receive chains of the same node.
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